Connecting with God through poetic articulations of lived, embodied experience–engaging texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for Christian churches, other biblical and spiritual texts, and evocations of the divine in rituals and other public events–always accepting lived reality as a primary source of divine revelation and mystery.

white supremacy

Enough is enough calls out the pastor again, again, again, and the people respond in kind, round by round energy rising, filling the sanctuary, layers of meaning from shared history, older ones remembering Jim Crow, younger ones feeling the endless string of indignities, living while Black, all knowing that the latest brother gunned while down could have been their son, their husband, their friend, brother, neighbor, co-worker, and knowing it is not done, that after seven years they are amazed the President of the United States remains alive, while still victim of hate that spreads across the web, doubting his religion, even his birth, sure that a Black man cannot be trusted to do more than loot or sit high in a hazy crack-filled den or rape bodies of women the haters claim to own.

Alton Sterling youtube.com

Anger rises as tears flow, arms reach to heaven a blend of righteous indignation and sacred supplication, the preacher only pausing to catch her breath and renew the claim on anger that can be turned not inward but out in constructive action to change the world, undo old ways, stand together even with white folk who love, care, and weep in recognition of too long silence helping to create what is now the crucible of death upon death, blood, more blood flowing, urban rivers of mothers’ tears exposing like Jesus on the cross the ugliness of humanity mocking God’s creation, denying Her love that flows nonetheless with their tears. Today is the day cries the pastor, today is the day the people reply, we can do something to change this tortured world, we have in us the power, God’s power since conception in our mothers’ wombs, and it is time to use it to stop the violence, to get the guns off the streets, train the cops or remove them if they resist the simple lesson that dark skin is not the enemy but friend, neighbor, brother, sister, fellow child of the one and only God.

This has been going on a long time—whether we mean hate or resistance to hate—and the tide keeps turning for love, then falls back for hate, rolling to and fro, four hundred plus years of enslavement first of African folk and now the many descendants of slavers still chained to ugliness oozing from every pore, spittle splattering what God intends to be hope, while others use that hope to change direction, marching together across the lines for justice, mercy, love. We have had too much hate and not enough love, so the pastor calls out, Love Is Love, and the people respond in kind, in love for love, knowing, believing in their depths, that it is the only power to defeat hate. But this love must be more than sweet, this love must overturn tables too, sometimes interrupting regular worship, driving merchants of hate from sacred precincts, and back alleys and bayous, by tidal wave upon tidal wave of love rising, cleansing sin and the stain of sin from twisted white souls yearning to be free, and bringing precious divine power to the disinherited also yearning to be free. Freedom, oh freedom, freedom washing over me.